You will never feel the sun’s warmth under a blue sky, never hear the wind in the branches of a tree, and never swim in the ocean, because you had the misfortune to be born on the Ship. You have never seen Earth, and you’ll never see Proxima Centauri either, your past and future both sacrificed by some dim and nameless ancestor to the greater good of the Mission.
Starfarer, they called her, a pretty name for a retrofitted interplanetary freighter. She had already been twenty years in service when she was rechristened, and showing every minute of it. No one is certain the Ship will actually reach its destination, and nobody much cares, since no one alive now will live to see it. Might as well get on with your life and try to make the best of it.

Your character's world is a “generation ship,” a massive spacecraft on a centuries long voyage to colonize a distant planet. The Ship's original government has been disbanded following a violent mutiny and you must negotiate a treacherous path among your fellow passengers and the contentious factions striving to dominate the Ship. Your choices alone will determine who your friends and enemies are.

Skill-based character system, with feats and biological implants.

Tactical turn-based combat, featuring standard as well as targeted attacks and weapon-specific special attacks such as Fanning and Long Burst.

12 recruitable party members with different personalities, agendas, and beliefs.

3 main factions and a score of lesser factions and groups.

A large arsenal including melee weapons, firearms, energy pistols, grenades, and fancy electronic gadgets like the Reality Distortion Field.

16 environments to explore, from the Engine Room and Hydroponics Lab to the dystopian cities of the Habitat and the Wasteland, the now uncharted corridors and decks that bore the brunt of the fighting during the Mutiny.

The game is still in pretty early development, with a demo showcasing combat being planned. Maybe I created this thread too early, but we'll see how it goes.

It was a hybrid of RPG and CYOA. Combat can be difficult to get into at first and some skill checks can be a bit overwhelming (this is one thing the lead developer acknowledged, that the skills feel a bit too passive), but the world and writing are pretty solid. The story branching is pretty good, and the sense of exploration is masterfully done. Each build feels like its own story in a way. There is room for improvement on certain aspects, but a pretty good game overall, especially for a first.

Anyway, the problem with power armor is it has to be awesome, which isn't bad in itself, but this awesomeness tends to make all the other armor obsolete (not to mention that *traditional* power armor should be pretty good against all types of damage, which would make the different types of damage pointless the moment you get your hands on such armor).

So we decided to explore a different direction. The power armor isn't really 'armor'. It's a device that creates a defensive field around you. As such it doesn't have any damage resistance whatsoever.

There are 3 basic types: light, medium, heavy. You wear it like a vest. You can't wear other vests, so it's a trade off: damage resistance vs shield vs deflector. More on that in a moment. You can wear a jacket or a trenchcoat with it, so you will have some DR, just not as much as with a tactical vest.

At the moment the armor comes in two varieties:

- an energy shield that absorbs all damage until depleted (no DR). Essentially it grants you immunity for the first couple of turns, then you're on your own. If you can't use this immunity wisely and kill a couple of enemies fast, the armor isn't for you. The other energy shield (the gadget one) is weaker and doesn't absorb all damage (i.e. has DR), and can't be moved (i.e. you 'cast' it on a tile). Light, medium, heavy - 20, 40, 60 HP.

- a deflector that turns a critical into a regular strike, a regular into a graze, a graze into a miss. The deflector will lose power with every turn, so we'll need to count turns and reduce %. For example, a heavy model will start with 90% chance to deflect at turn 1, 80% at turn 2, 70% at turn 3, 60% at turn 4, and so on until the deflector is out of juice (0%). Medium will go with 90, 75, 60, 45, 30, 15, 0. Light - 90, 70, 50, 30, 10, 0

Since it's non-linear we can easily expand it and add more properties and different defensive abilities.

Full demo? No. Combat demo? That's the goal but it's too early to say if we manage to hit it.

Let's say we release it in mid Dec. We'll need a month of closed beta testing (with 20+ players), maybe more, but let's say 4 weeks. We'll need a month of internal testing and tweaking before we can start the closed beta test. So we'll need to have everything in place and ready for playing in mid Oct, which means we have 2.5 months to get there. While we can cut some corners and add non-critical stuff later, it goes without saying that it's better to delay it to early 2019 than to release unplayable and unbalanced mess in 2018. First impressions and all that.

The character and combat systems, including the AI and pathfinding should be ready in about 2 months, so we're right on schedule here.

The item and dialogue editors are done.

The level itself and the dialogues are done.

The basic GUI is done but we still need the art pass, the main screen, and quite a few portraits for the enemies. I believe we can wrap it up in 2-3 months.

The weapons are done (models and icons).

The animations should be ready in 3 months (talking about the basic stuff here, no fancy death animations yet)

The armor is still in very early stages. We thought that Joao would be able to handle it, he couldn't, so it went back to Ivan (the animator). It's too late to look for someone else now, so all we can do is hope and pray that he can handle both tasks (the armor and the animations) in the next 4 months as we can add them last minute (we have rough animations at the moment).

We picked the name (The New World) a few months before the first reports about Amazon's MMO hit the net, meaning we didn't know about Amazon's New World back then. Yes, we should have double-checked again before launching the site, but we didn't. Back then it wasn't clear if the MMO is still in development as there were rumors of cancellations, so we decided to wait and see what transpires. Well, as of last week it's clear that Amazon's New World is alive and kicking, which means we have to change the name.

I really liked The New World as it fits the game perfectly and while Amazon hasn't contacted us about the name, their pre- and post-release media campaign would drown us. Fortunately, we haven't done any real marketing yet, so changing the name is relatively easy at this point. All we need is a fitting name, which is where you come in.

The idea is to gather feedback for a fitting title. The devs have some names in mind but are open to suggestion.

So far the armor thing (the delay) is our biggest problem, which is a good indicator as I can think of worse things to screw up. It's slowly moving forward, so I hope that we'll have it done in 3 weeks. Similar to the weapons, the armor is split into 2 main categories: common Ship-made ballistic armor and rare Earth-made combat and anti-riot armor. You can expect 10 unique models for each category: helmet, body armor, jacket/coat, boots, goggles, mask/respirator. Right now we have about a third (talking about the models).

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